Thomas Haarklau Kleppestø @thomaskleppesto - Tumblr Blog

Nervesystemets Solsystem: Evolusjon og Eksistens hos Tor Ulven

Picture: Gina Vasquez

Livet er avlyst.

La oss sove videre til neste eon.

Snart blir solen en supernova, samme faen.

Vi seiler gjennom universet på en enorm sten. Menneskene, fiskene, øglene, plantene: Alt holdes nede av jordens tyngdekraft og sammen flyter det avgårde som på en enorm båt gjennom den svarte evighet. Her ble vi født. Her skal vi dø. Kjøtt utenpå knokler som igjen er kledd inn i hud. Huden som det arkaiske klessplaget, altså. Men hva er innenfor? Jeg og du? Her begynner jeg. Der slutter jeg. Men brått så forvitrer huden og kjøttet. Ditt hjerte, din lever. Lungene, milten, hjernen og tåneglene. Til slutt er bare kraniet igjen, liggende på stranden, kanskje, hvor bølgene så vidt skyller over tennene som før tilhørte deg. Ett kosmisk øyeblikk bare, så er kraniumet også blitt en del av mineralriket.

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The Human Diet: What it Means to Eat Healthy

Look closely at the picture at the start of this article. It is the African savanna. This is what the habitat of most of your ancestors looked like. Homo sapiens—this bipedal, naked ape—lived there when our species evolved a few hundred thousand years ago (and the non-modern-human ancestors lived there for millions of years before that). Humans wandered these African fields as nomadic omnivores, eating plants and animals. And compared to our now-extinct ancestor Homo erectus, the size of the human brain grew hysterically, while the gut shrank. In fact, humans have one of the smallest guts, compared to size, of all mammals (and you thought your stomach was astronomic? Expect raised eyebrows when you start complaining about it to gorillas or elephants). The reason for the small gut is because early members of Homo sapiens began eating higher-quality food such as meat, and, fascinatingly, because we started cooking. Cooking eases digestion and makes the nutrients more available for consumption. A cooked potato for example, gives off twice as many calories compared to a raw one. Because of the new lifestyle of the first modern humans, it seems that evolution favored a smaller digestive tract because the new diet was so close to the macronutriental ideal, mentioned earlier. As Paul Jaminet and Shou-Ching Jaminet write in their Perfect Health Diet, “evolution got rid of 80 percent of our colon volume and shrank our livers”. No need for the large and costly fermenter we call a gut, when the fat and protein that is necessary for the cells to function is there already, ready for the taking. Because humans, compared to other animals, largely lost the ability to convert large volumes of plant matter into fat, a healthy human diet is the hunter-gatherer diet, which indeed is mostly fat, with carbs and protein in the minority. Now, if eating what our digestion system evolved to process is healthy, we should ask what our hunting and gathering ancestors actually ate. Although hunting and gathering societies are on the verge of extinction, data from modern hunter-gatherers, and estimates of past environments, can shed light on this. Eaton and his colleges (2000) have estimated the macronutriental intakes of hunter-gatherers, based on the fat and protein in the animals they hunted, and the plants that were available to them. And one thing is clear from the outset: the diets of hunter-gatherers differ across the world. There is no one-and-only hunter-gatherer diet. Nonetheless, Eaton and his colleges (2000), emphasize that there are trends “that transcend geographic and ecologic boundaries and represent nearly all the world’s hunter-gatherers”. For example, we know that most hunter-gatherers ate a huge variety of plants. We also know that 73% of worldwide hunter-gatherers derived at least 50% of their calories from animal foods. This might sound like a lot, but hunter gatherers do not waste anything. All parts of the animals are eaten. Today many westerners eat just the lean muscle. For a hunter-gatherer this habit would be flabbergasting, because the fatty parts of an animal are the most prized and sought-after pieces. We crave fat for a reason. Hunter-gatherers eat livers, hearts, feet, bone marrow, and so on. These parts have always been highly nutritious and precious food for humans. See, for example, what this San man from the Kalahari Desert recommends to a westerner.

By the same logic, even grains can become “paleo” in the future. But for now, it certainly is not. And this has to do with another evolutionary process: Arms races. Unlike mammals, plants cannot run away from predators. This is why plants are the evil chemists of this earth. They defend themselves with toxins. Fruit is different. Fruit-meat is designed to be nutritious for mammals (although exaggeratedly so in the fleshly, seedless, artificially selected fruits of today). The seed in wild fruits are armored with a shell, making it tough to digest, surviving mammalian digestion, and hence it spreads wherever the fruit-eating animal takes a dump (makes for a head start: born in manure). But fruits are the exception amongst plants. Grains, the seeds of grasses, have no evolutionary interest in being eaten by mammals. Which is why they have evolved toxic proteins that interferes with the digestion of herbivores (examples are gluten and agglutinin). But grass-eating herbivores have, in turn, evolved defenses against grain-toxins, such as bacteria that take care of toxins (this is the “arms race”). Most plants contain toxins. At low levels most of these toxins are unlikely to cause damage to humans (remember: the dose makes the poison). Hence we do not need to worry about this most of the time. Nonetheless, toxins from food that are evolutionary novel for humans (like grains and beans) are more likely to be damaging, especially in large doses, because we have not evolved the appropriate defenses. Part of the reason is that grains contain anti-nutrients such as phytate. Indeed, for every gram of the outer layer of wheat eaten by humans, the fecal weight increases by 5.78 grams (Cummings, 2001), suggesting that they hinder proper digestion. Indeed, in an excellent overview on “naturally occurring food toxins”, Dolan, Matulka and Burdock (2010) write that phytate in grains and legumes “has been shown to inhibit digestive enzymes such as trypsin, pepsin, α-amylase and ß-glucosidase”. This is probably a huge part of the weird enigma that many westerners, and poor people all over the world, are both overweight and malnourished at the same time. A diet heavy on carbohydrates from cheap grains keeps the insulin over-active, saving much of the energy as fat. In concert, the toxic proteins in the same grains hinders digestion of vitamins (especially D-vitamin) and other nutrients from the other foods that are eaten. Hence, in humans, grains achieve the goals of becoming fat and vitamin-deficient beautifully.

And then, dear reader, the carbohydrates: The dietary devil? Or the essential brain-food we all have learned about in school? Ancestral guidelines make it clear that “low-carb diets”, are not really low-carb, but the standard western diet is excessively high-carb. What are the consequences of this? Contrary to popular myths, whether or not a calorie comes from carb, fat or protein do matter. In his book Why We Get Fat: And What To Do About It, Gary Taubes convincingly argues that the old calories-in-calories-out hypothesis we all have come to believe (author included) is deeply misguided. If you eat more calories than you use, you will gain weight, right? This is the law of thermodynamics, and stuff… right? No and no. The calories-in-calories-out dogma ignores that humans (and other animals) are biological systems, not robots or cars. For instance, why do women put on more fat and at different locations than men after puberty? Because they eat more and exercise less? Of course not. Fat storage is regulated by hormones, not calories per se. When you eat carbohydrates your pancreas secretes insulin which in turn trigger cellular storage of fat. Insulin is a huge part of what makes mammals fat. You can think of insulin this way: it is a messenger voyaging your arteries, telling the fat and muscle cells it passes to “store more energy in your cells!” This procedure is essential because abundant glucose in your blood is toxic. The glucose must be removed quickly. Insulin is also useful because it tells cells to store energy for later use. In the modern day though, when humans eat large amounts of carbohydrate-rich foods, and especially if you do throughout the day (another dogma: eat many meals spread throughout the day. Who came up with this terrible idea?), your bloodstream becomes flooded with insulin. This is like having thousands of punks (the insulin) travelling in your bloodstream constantly screaming: “save more fat! There is plenty around! Do not spend your any of your savings!” When humans eat pasta, bread, donuts, muffins, and candy (none of which existed for our ancestors) the insulin system gets overloaded. Over time, the fat and muscle cells are unable to store all the energy within its cells, and the insulin-receptors on those cells become less effective. The insulin sensitivity drops. This is what makes people, and the pets and cattle we feed high-carb diets, diabetic. And, of course, it makes them fat.

The relative dangers of drugs: What the science says

Photo by h.koppdelaney

Humans indulge in activities that alter both the content and the experience of their own consciousness. Drugs are a means for achieving a number of particular, often recreational, changes in conscious experience. However, drugs are also a large contributor to, and facilitator of, human suffering and health problems. The best health advice anyone can give to most people most of the time regarding recreational drug use is this: “Do not use drugs”. Many people however, including me, do not find this advice particularly attractive, or even sensible. Assuming that a person wants to enjoy the mind-altering effects of psychoactive substances, two questions follows: which drugs are dangerous to use? And, more importantly - how can one know which drugs are more dangerous than others? The answer to both questions, of course, can be found through the illuminating lens of the scientific method.

Critical Thinking: Why it is Beautiful, Necessary and a Potential Antidote for Evil

Photo by Lapolab

”Critical thinking is a desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to consider, carefulness to dispose and set in order; and hatred for every kind of imposture.“

~ Francis Bacon (1605)

Information constantly has, and still is, surrounding humans. Whether the information is in the stories and myths told by a respected elder in an ancient hunter-gatherer society or in ads on a modern website, prevailing questions begs to be answered: Is the information reliable? Can the source be trusted? Is there any hidden intentions? The only known principles for acquiring reliable and valid knowledge about the cosmos and everything within it are the scientific method. And the only way of successfully pursuing the scientific method is by thinking critically. Not only is critical thinking the very cornerstone of scientific inquiry, it is also a cognitive style – a way of thinking – that raises consciousness and opens minds. Being a critical thinker does not imply that one is supposed to criticize or deny every proposition that exists. Denying every claim regarding the universe is not being critical; quite on the contrary, it is systematic dogmatism - a methodical rejection that serves no function other than fueling ignorance. Instead, critical thinking means to look at all the available evidence and ask: is there any way that this could be wrong? If the answers seems to be “no”, then a light might be shed at the end of the intellectual tunnel. If the evidence is absent or inconclusive then admitting that one does not know, is the virtuous response of the critical thinker. The critically thinking mind is like science itself: always open to falsification in the face of new evidence.

The human mind is prone to irrationally and biased/distorted thinking. And it is no wonder: the mind did not evolve to test predictions about the world in an objective and unbiased way. In fact, many of our logical fallacies and cognitive biases stem from adaptive (increasing chance of survival and reproduction) functions. Natural selection pressures did not favor the analytical philosopher pondering every decision and situation to the very last detail. Quick, implicit and even unconscious decision-making are, in specific situations and contexts, necessary in terms of surviving and reproducing. It makes sense to bias any system towards avoiding costly errors, despite the risks of false alarms. (e.g. consider sensitive smoke detectors - the risk of a fire going unnoticed greatly outweighs the risk of false alarms). The human nervous system is no exception, the brain evolved to reason adaptively, not scientifically and truthfully. There are many examples of cognitive biases (here is a good list of them). A skilled critical thinker would try to avoid most of them. Alas, that is difficult, but not impossible. Some of them are more prevalent, and more important to avoid. One is confirmation bias, which is the tendency to select data or evidence that confirms ones preconceptions. This is particularly evident when proponents of alternative medicine accept anecdotal evidence at face value, but are extremely “critical” of scientific evidence that falsifies their hypothesis. The same lines of reasoning goes for popular conspiracy theories, where “evidence” are collected in favor of beliefs already held (examples: 9/11 was an inside job, holocaust-denial, staged moon landing, illuminati taking over the world, and so on). Another important bias is the tendency to confuse correlation and causality; the number of pirates on the sea over the last hundred years has gone down, and the global temperature has gone up. Now, do pirates cause global cooling? Probably not. In order to find out what causes events it is necessary to control for and experiment with potential confounding variables by using scientific experiments. The error of confusing correlation with causality is very common, even amongst scientists. For example, a sociologist studying the effect of smoking parents on the probability that their kids will start smoking. The result might indicate a high correlation (80%, say) and lead the scientist to conclude that the smoking parent caused the child to start smoking. This is a fallacy. Other variables need to be controlled for, like the possibility that shared genes can explain some of the variance.

Why is this happening? The brain is constantly, and very often unconsciously, perceiving patterns and conjoining events. This association is necessary for learning. However, as we saw earlier, the costs of failing to associate important events together (fire causes skin burn) outweighs potential false alarms (for instance, believing a rain dance causes rain because of a few random correlations). Both the confirmation bias and the causation fallacy are often automatic and unintentional. Thus, making critical thinking even more important; in fact, few things in this world are more worth the trouble. Although cognitive biases probably helped early humans to pass on their genes, they are not of much help for the modern human trying to make sense of things like the origin of the universe, consciousness and human nature, and they certainly do not help the critical thinker. Rather, it facilitates dogmatic thinking and can lead to several flaws like stereotyping, conclusion-jumping, failure to notice contradictions, acceptance of inaccurate information, irrelevant and vague questions, ignoring relevant ideas and concepts and can, more generally, lead to poor judgment and illogical, irrational, hypocritical and imprecise thinking.

So how can one make our individual thought patterns clear and coherent? The best way is to learn the principles of science, and how to integrate them, fundamentally, in ones thinking. A good way to start is by using metacognition: thinking about thinking. Thoughts can be vague, fuzzy or formless, leading to poor judgment and decision making. Thus, reflecting over such processes, making sense of them and making them explicit can help severely. For instance, ask yourself: When was the last time I changed my mind because someone presented good reasons and superior arguments for their views? People rarely do this, and it is a genuinely weird phenomenon. Everyone would benefit from the ability to change ones minds; in fact, it is the most intellectually honest act possible. Yet, people are refrained by attitude change. In most of the world’s religions it is even virtuous to hold on to beliefs, regardless of circumstance: “Though you have not seen him, you love him” (1 Peter 1:8). I view this as a preposterous and potentially dangerous threat to human reasoning abilities. If beliefs are held and perpetuated onto future generations based what one wants to be true, and/or on what one have been brought up and indoctrinated to believe is true, a serious underminer of the critical thought is proposed.

The critical thinker always leaves the door of doubt open. She looks for and embraces opportunities to make changes in her thinking. This is the very antithesis to most religious doctrine and thought, especially in the fundamental context. Fundamentalist religious doctrine always adheres to some radical and objective truth regarding reality. Often times the fundamentalist will not argue that their position is correct based on some philosophical or scientific inquiry, but instead on revelations found in their particular holy scripture which is perceived as absolute truth’s from an omniscient and omnipotent God(s). Rational argument, it seems, deem unnecessary, and by good measure: who questions an almighty creator? Well, critical inquiry does. Imagine if Mohamed Atta (9/11 hijacker) was a critical thinker. Ideas of heavenly reward for martyrdom would immediately be rejected as nonsense, or at least as an extremely unlikely and non-testable hypothesis. If Breivik (the Norwegian islamophobic man killing innocent children in Norway 22 july, 2011) had the ability to be a devil’s advocate for his racist generalization of 1.2 billion human beings in this world (muslims) it might have helped to eradicate dogmatic confirmation biases. Getting all your information from right-wing extremist’s websites is a great example on how not to get a clear and comprehensive understanding on how the world works. Thus, I would argue that critical thinking is an antidote for evil. The critical thinker realizes that racist generalizations of groups of people almost always are wrong. Whenever there is a group of 2 or more people, there is always variation.

Pure evil, let us remember, is not inherited, and critical thinking can be learned by anyone. If children learned good techniques for thinking rationally, in every culture as early as possible, we could strike dogmatism, irrationalities, cognitive pitfalls and even evil at its very core. Allowing people to turn on the guiding light of truth that critical thinking provides us. If we did, no one would need to waste time and energy on creationist bronze-age myths, climate change denying, conspiratorial paranoia, repression of gays, women and ethnic groups, “pro-lifers” trying to end important stem-cell research, popes suggesting condoms make the AIDS situation in Africa worse (not a joke), people flying planes into buildings, and the list goes on. Dogmatism and irrationalities draws attention away from the issues that really matters like poverty, climate change, education and science.

Let’s embrace the Socratic questioning often exhibited by children: Why is the grass green, mommy? Why are birds flying? Why are the stars shining? Why are some people good and others bad? Let’s teach our children how to think, not what to think. The most beautiful thing about the human species, and it is indeed essentially human, is the fact that we have devised tools that can help us think clearly, comprehensively, precisely and objectively. We can analyze our thinking and our thinking about our thinking, giving us insight into our own ignorance while fueling our own curiosity. This is marvelous and exceptionally beautiful. It deems faith without evidence unnecessary. Consider that a golden rule with one striking exception: never have faith in anything except reason. The sweet fruits of knowledge only grow on the critical tree.

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Thomas Haarklau Kleppestø